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Radio Diaries

The Rubber Room

Radio Diaries

Radio Diaries & Radiotopia

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.61.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2017

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The New York City public school system is huge. More than a million students, all being taught by 75,000 teachers. Except, a few hundred of those teachers are being paid NOT to teach. These are teachers who are accused of misconduct. Often without warning, they’re removed from their classrooms and sent to a Department of Education reassignment center. Teachers call it: “The Rubber Room.”

The truth is, some of these teachers haven’t done anything wrong. And sometimes they don’t even know why they’ve ended up in the Rubber Room. But the worst part is that teachers can remain there for years while their cases slowly creep through the system. Not guilty, not innocent… just doing time. In 2010, the NYC Department of Education made an agreement with the Teachers Union to close the Rubber Room. Turns out, that hasn’t been so easy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening to Radio Diaries. This is Joe.

0:03.0

And this is Elisa.

0:05.0

And we want to thank everybody who has donated to Radiotopia's annual fundraiser so far.

0:09.0

We are coming to the end of the road, but we still have yet to reach our goal of a thousand donors.

0:15.3

So we want to let you know some of the things that your donation supports here at Radio Diaries.

0:21.5

We just finished our big series, The Unmarched Graveyard, and there's some expenses that you might expect, you know, paying for our producers, paying for research, paying for some gear, and there's some unexpected things.

0:34.0

Elisa, is there anything that was kind of unexpected?

0:37.0

For sure, like with the first story that I worked on, I interviewed a woman named Susan

0:41.2

Harlebert, whose son had died and was buried on Hard Island.

0:45.4

And after I interviewed her, I realized that she had actually never visited her son's grave.

0:50.1

So we decided to set that up.

0:52.0

You know, I went to pick her up a couple hours north of the city that cost us some gas money.

0:56.4

We put her up in a hotel and I bought a bunch of pizza and bagels to power us through the weekend.

1:01.7

And it was a really beautiful and

1:04.0

carb-filled couple days.

1:07.0

We hope that gives you a glimpse at some of the things that your donation helps

1:10.0

to support here at Radio Diaries

1:12.0

and we hope that you'll support us and the rest of the shows in the Radio Topia family.

1:17.0

You can donate today at radiotopia.F.M. slash donate. That'siotopia. F.M.

1:23.0

and thank you so much for your support.

1:26.0

Hey everybody, we want to let you know that there's a new podcast in the Radiotopia network.

1:36.0

It's called Ear Hustle and it features stories of life in prison told and produced by inmates at San Quentin State Prison.

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